Optimization of Discontinuous Reception (DRX) for Mobile Internet Applications over LTE

Discontinuous reception (DRX) brings power saving at user equipment (UE) at the cost of increased delay in 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) network. While configuring DRX parameters, a tradeoff between power saving and delay is inevitable in practice. For example, delay is crucial factor for delay sensitive applications such as online gaming, while power saving becomes the main concern for social networking applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to efficiently select DRX parameters to ensure a balanced tradeoff between these two conflicting performance parameters depending on application's delay requirement and UE power constraint. The proposed scheme is capable of optimizing one of these performance parameters while satisfying a specified level of guarantee for the other. Simulation results show that proposed algorithm is able to increase the power saving significantly by efficiently selecting the DRX parameters. For example, smart selection of DRX cycle for given inactivity timer increases the power saving by more than 40% depending on the delay requirement. Simulation results further show that proposed algorithm provides higher flexibility in DRX parameter selection by allowing a DRX parameter to be relaxed with the adjustment in other DRX parameter without any performance degradation.